


An eight-months' baby

by Naraht



Category: Return to Night - Mary Renault
Genre: 1910s, Childbirth, Crueltide, F/M, Gen, Mother-Son Relationship, Unplanned Pregnancy, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-29
Updated: 2014-11-29
Packaged: 2018-02-27 11:40:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2691587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Julian's uncertain parentage is one of the horrors of the war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An eight-months' baby

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lilliburlero](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/gifts).



> Thanks to my beta, Hadjie.

"The occasional necessity for eight months' babies - eight months after marriage - makes them relatively common in married primiparæ."  
\- Alexander H. P. Leuf, _Gynecology, Obstetrics, Menopause_ (1902)

 

On the morning of the wedding Elaine was sick with nerves. Pulling the chain of the toilet, she felt her skin clammy and sweat-damp against her petticoats, and wondered whether anyone in the house had heard. She put her hand to the glass doorknob and then, changing her mind, sagged against the wall. Sunlight shone through the stained glass of the half-window above the toilet, painting a rippled pattern in lurid purple and red across the folds of her new cream silk.

In all the rush and worry over the wedding preparations she had happened to miss her monthlies. She was reminded of it now, but had hardly the leisure to dwell on the thought. Soon the carriage would be arriving at the door and her father calling impatiently for her to come downstairs.

How many bad dreams had she washed away here in the light of day? Now there was another to add to the list. A Catholic ceremony only a few miles back from the front-line trenches, hurried, without friends or family, accompanied only by the constant pounding of the guns... she could not credit it now, nor connect it with any reality. It could not have happened; it was better to imagine that it never had. This was reality, this life in England. Everything else was nightmare, to be firmly and forever barred. It could be - must be - forgotten.

Three hours later, by special license, she became Mrs. Richard Fleming. Though the wedding was small, and at an unfashionable hour of the morning, it was held at St George's, Hanover Square. She could hardly have considered herself properly married otherwise. 

They did not stay in London for the honeymoon; they both wanted somewhere quiet, away from the officers on leave, away from the fear of Zeppelin raids. Instead they spent a week in a hotel in Swanage, a quiet, well-appointed place where Elaine's parents had stayed on holidays before the war. Nowadays the hotel was half residential, filled with the elderly escaping other coastal resorts. 

Richard and Elaine turned heads as they went down to dinner that first night. As Elaine walked on his arm, she saw the scene in her mind's eye: the handsome officer - for all officers were handsome in uniform, even Richard, and especially if they had attained the rank of Major - with his new bride, who had changed out of her travelling clothes into a new blue silk evening dress, cut daringly short to show the ankles. She was conscious of the doubled strand of pearls around her neck, a Fleming family heirloom that had been Richard's wedding gift to her, and how the dark blue of the silk set off her fair hair. 

Vanity, she had sworn off vanity, hadn't she? And yet she felt she deserved one final night of glory, even if it were in a hotel in Swanage, before settling into respectable matronhood.

"I'm afraid it's hardly Paris," Richard said.

It was, she thought, nothing like a honeymoon in Paris.

During dinner they made polite conversation. Elaine thought it might rain tomorrow; Richard, who viewed weather from the standpoint of the trenches, disagreed and told her why. She deferred consciously, dropping her eyes and smiling. Outside the hospital they had little to discuss, having so quickly lost the common ground of that busy, self-contained world.

Across the table he seemed unfamiliar to her, a stranger with whom chance had paired her. He had returned to England only three days before the wedding, barely a week after she had arrived herself. On the platform she had scarcely recognised his moustached face, as though she had been waiting for someone else entirely. It had occurred to her that she had never seen him outside the hospital; he had still been limping as he came to her side. A minor leg wound, not enough to keep him from the front now that he had been discharged; there would hardly be enough time for the honeymoon. A matter of inches, or it might have been said that she was marrying him out of pity, instead of - if they knew the truth - the reverse.

But Elaine brushed away this thought as both immodest and unworthy.

 _You will come to know him over the coming years,_ she reminded herself. _He's your husband now. You've become one flesh._

Over sherry trifle this mysterious alchemy seemed difficult to discern. It became clearer, in prospect at least, when Richard turned down coffee, coloured deeply beneath his moustache, and murmured with an air of a man recounting a story of extreme indelicacy that she must be tired from the railway journey and might wish to retire early.

Elaine could only murmur her own gratitude. She rose smoothly from her chair, unwilling to subject him to any further embarrassment through delay. She could not help but think that Andy would have managed it with so much less awkwardness.

The same thought came back to her a little less than half an hour later, as she lay in bed beside her new husband. It was a moonlit night; Richard was snoring lightly. She had been afraid lest through some movement or gesture she might betray herself, but instead he had betrayed his own inexperience. Afraid of outraging her modesty, he had never asked her to take off her night gown. He had not delayed; she had not needed to counterfeit pain. His apologies, though sincere, had been both belated and brief. She supposed he did not know that a wedding night could be any different.

 _This is your first wedding night,_ she reminded herself. _Your only wedding night._

Finally a rightfully married woman in the eyes of God and man, Elaine turned on her side, away from Richard. The pleasures of Andy's embrace had come, she knew now, from the experience of a hardened seducer, and that could hardly be accounted pleasure. Richard would learn; they both would. 

And yet she lay awake for hours, afraid of her dreams. 

***

Richard had barely the time to see her across the threshold of her new home before returning to France.

Her parents worried that she would be lonely at Larch Hill and they had urged her to have her own sister to stay. Gwen, who was nineteen and still mourning a promised year at a finishing school in Paris, would have been only too happy to oblige - but Elaine had firmly refused, and could not now feel anything but justified.

Her days were full enough. There was a staff to supervise: before the war Larch Hill had been a considerably larger establishment than her parents'. It was reduced now, but for that reason Elaine thought it even more important to insist upon strict discipline. She had begun to wonder whether she would ever have her own home to run; now, gratefully, she pored over the pages of Mrs. Beeton and planned menus with as much exactness as if there were twelve seated round the oak dining table instead of only one.

Three weeks after the wedding another date on the calendar came and went. This time she noticed; this time she began to pray. She maintained a rigid self-control borne of terror as she moved through her new responsibilities as the lady of Larch Hill, unwilling to betray any trace of unease in front of the servants. She had seen so much blood in France; how could she cry over its absence now?

Rather than allowing herself to dwell unhealthily upon the thought, she went on rounds of visits to her new county neighbours and served endless cups of tea in the drawing room, for everyone was curious to see the new mistress of Larch Hill. She agreed to teach Sunday school, to join the Altar Guild, to attend the Women's Institute, to roll bandages in the village hall and to contribute her crochet work to the church fete. There was a note of condescension and pity in the invitations, one thought.

"But of course if you had a baby," said old Mrs. Layton, "it would be such a comfort to you with your husband away."

Elaine thought it rather vulgar even to make the suggestion, but she attempted to mute her disapproval; this part of Gloucestershire, when it was not Fleming land, belonged to the Laytons, and one could hardly make enemies so early. Though her heart was hammering in her chest, Mrs. Layton could hardly know the reason why. 

"You'll see," Mrs. Layton added. "A child is so steadying. There's no reason to delay."

***

After another week Elaine went to see Doctor Lowe, a kindly man in his thirties who listened to her heart with great seriousness and declared himself without doubt as to the new Mrs. Fleming's delicate condition and her hopes of expecting an heir. On a more important subject he refused to commit himself.

"Could you tell me how - far along I am?" asked Elaine.

She found herself wringing her hands. Her emerald ring, a Fleming family heirloom and still unfamiliar on the finger, scratched at her skin.

Dr. Lowe sat back in his chair with a half-sigh. "In the first trimester certainly. Remind me - if you will, Mrs Fleming - when you ceased to be unwell...?"

"Only this week, I should have - but of course, that was why I came to see you, doctor. Because I noticed that I hadn't..." This was precisely what she had said at the beginning of the visit. He had written it down; one would have thought that he would remember it. "But I had hoped that you would be able to determine things more precisely through examination."

"Beyond the hope of medical science, I'm afraid. I always like to say that a woman is the most reliable judge. If your last menses was four weeks ago, then it's simply a matter of counting back..."

Her face was burning already with the embarrassment of discussing these things with a man. She wished that she could have gone to a woman doctor, but of course there was no such creature in Gloucestershire.

"It should have been," she said. It was an effort of which she would have been incapable if she had not been a nurse. "But with all the rush and worry of getting ready for the wedding, one can hardly be certain. In all honesty - one hardly noticed. You must think me terribly forgetful."

"Of course not." Doctor Lowe smiled reassuringly; beneath it was the air of a doctor who congratulates himself on a successful diagnosis. "The stress of wedding preparations often produces just this effect in young women. Nothing could be more normal, though naturally it makes determining a due date more difficult. A wise doctor, I always say, hesitates to commit himself. Babies will come when they will come, and many is the man who's been made a fool when a baby arrives weeks earlier or later than he predicted. December or January, shall we say?"

"Thank you, Dr. Lowe," said Elaine faintly, thinking that there was every difference in the world between the two months.

"As I say," he continued, "babies come when they will come. Even an early baby, an eight-months baby, is often a perfectly healthy size; one thinks they must positively enjoy confounding the profession. You mustn't worry about anything, Mrs. Fleming."

***

Any sensible medical advice she would have accepted with gratitude, but this final admonition was beyond her.

Her confinement was a long agony of impatience blended with the feeling that time was slipping through her hands. She read books on mothercraft, and books meant for nurses that shocked her with their explicitness. She breathed fresh, country air, went walking on the estate, made her appearances at church as Lynchwick expected. As long as she dared she wore a corset, loosened reluctantly and little by little. Her vanity would have made her deplore her burgeoning waistline even if she had not had reason to fear its meaning, but she was carrying prominently and a plethora of pretty maternity dresses could not console her for that.

Instead of knitting socks for the troops she knit clothes for the baby, tiny jackets and jumpers in the softest of wool, creating a layette to make up for the trousseau that she had been denied.

A girl; she had a decided feeling that it would be a girl. She would name her daughter Julia, after her grandmother. A petite baby, an easy labour; she would have wanted this anyway, and only glancingly did she allow herself to think of the other problems that this might solve. Any other woman would want first to bear her husband an heir - what was marriage for, after all? But, though she had married late, she was young and healthy enough and there was ample time for that. When Richard came home they would have a son together of whom would be no need for doubt.

Yet, as her pregnancy advanced to its conclusion, every twinge gave her fresh anxiety. It seemed unbearable that she should have to wait another month or more to be brought to bed, and yet even more unbearable that she should give birth sooner. She began to feel suffocated; Doctor Lowe said that it was the baby pressing upwards against her diaphragm. The cold days of winter kept her inside apart from short walks around the garden. Her long, distorted shadow rippled against the melting, frosty grass and she could see the fog of her quick breaths in the air. Indoors she sat by the fire, uncomfortable however she arranged herself against a flock of feather pillows, and only distracted by the application of novels from Mudie's which her mother would never have allowed into the house, and which she would have been ashamed to show to her husband.

Her labour pains began when she was halfway through _Aurora Floyd_ , which she had known from the start that she ought not to be reading. She had sat up late with it and at first she thought it must be indigestion, or a phantom pain. It was only the middle of December and, if her wishes were true, far too early - six weeks or more. But she had engaged a private nurse already in an excess of caution, careless of the cost, and rang for her finally in the small hours of the morning, when she began to be afraid. The hour was familiar to her from her service in France, a time of the night when even strong men would give up hope and succumb to their injuries, allowing themselves to slip away.

 _Let the baby not come too early,_ Elaine prayed as the pain caught her, lying on her side and feeling the sweat begin to prickle her forehead. _Only let her live._

And then as its grip released her, and she could breathe again, she thought: _Let me have been wrong. Let it be Richard's child, without a doubt. Nothing is more important than that. Nothing can be._

Firelight flickered on the walls, playing across the new Morris wallpaper that she had chosen a few months earlier. If an angel had come to her then and asked her to choose between the two outcomes, she would have prayed to God for a goodness that she knew she had never possessed.

The nurse arrived and began fussing with the instruments - all were sterilised already, thankfully. That small, familiar bustle of activity reminded Elaine of her hospital work. She raised her head, wanting to see that things were done correctly, but the nurse only came over to the bedside and eased her down onto the pillow once again.

"You mustn't worry about anything, Mrs. Fleming," she said in an accent whose forced half-gentility had begun to grate days earlier. "You've hired me to take care of it all, haven't you, now?"

Doctor Lowe arrived just after dawn, almost too late. Half an hour later Elaine Fleming was brought to bed of a son.

Once bathed and swaddled, he lay on her breast and gazed up at her with wondering eyes, as though he were equally surprised to find himself with such a mother. He had a shock of dark hair, almost black, and even in the dimness of a winter dawn she could make out that his eyes were a pale grey.

 _Andy's son._ It was, she resolved, the first and last time she would allow herself to think it. Her seducer would never see his son; he would never know that Julian existed. She felt a bitter joy at that, countered with an undertow of regret that was indistinguishable from the love that she already felt for her infant child.

"Six pounds fifteen ounces," said Doctor Lowe, washing his hands in a basin held by the nurse. "A good, sturdy boy."

The baby screwed up his face into a sneeze, which resolved itself into an expression of almost comical surprise.

"Yes," said Elaine faintly. She was beyond exhausted. She could not think of what one ought to say. The doctor was fussing about his instruments in a way that seemed calculated to exasperate; she had no need of him now. "If you don't mind, Doctor, I should like to be alone with my boy now."

***

As soon as she was allowed to sit up, Elaine wrote a letter to Richard. 

_We have a son. I should like to christen him Julian Richard. The doctor says that he is rather small, but perfectly healthy._

Once she had sent it to be posted she was overcome with regret, for this was the one untruth that she had allowed herself to express. Everything else had been left unspoken but this, once written, could not be unsaid.

She had a letter by return of post; Richard was thankful that she and the baby were well and had got leave for the christening. He would be home in six weeks.

Elaine was grateful for the lapse of time, thinking that Julian's size might not be so obvious in a baby no longer newborn. She stayed in with her new son, recuperating in the broad marital bed that she and her husband had never shared. The nurse brought Julian to her - she fed him herself, determined to be an irreproachable mother to the son whom she ought never to have brought into being. He nursed greedily, as if grasping at the life that she would have denied him, and put on weight with what seemed to her a shocking, indecent rapidity.

By the date of the christening he no longer had the look of a newborn. It was just nine months after the wedding, but Julian at seven weeks was a beautiful, bouncing, robust baby, beginning to be plump, and without any trace of delicacy or prematurity about him. 

Larch Hill was full of visitors for the first time since her own arrival. The upstairs rooms that she had made ready received their guests: along with her own parents there was the elder Mrs. Fleming, a Victorian dragon of the old school, who had thankfully moved to Bath for her health some years earlier, and arrived wearing antiquated and showy mourning for a great-nephew who had fallen at Gallipoli; her thin, particular sisters, the Misses Stanton; Richard's two elder sisters, Mrs. Hargreaves and Mrs. Frobisher, with their families; and her own younger sister Gwen. A veritable monstrous regiment. 

The only absence was Richard himself, who had telegraphed from Calais to say that his ferry had been delayed due to rough weather. He would try to get the next; if he could catch the night mail from London, and then the milk train, he would arrive on the very morning of the christening. It seemed too much to hope that he would not arrive at all.

Elaine had risen from bed only a few days before, and this was her first time looking after so many guests as mistress of her own household. She was thankful beyond belief for the work that she had done to establish Larch Hill as a well-running household, for there was Julian to manage as well, an infant tyrant who could imagine no other needs but his own.

On the morning of the christening, Elaine was in the nursery dressing him in the Victorian lace christening gown that her own mother had worn when she heard heavy footsteps downstairs. She realised, after a moment of confusion, that it was her husband. Richard had come home.

In nine months she had become so thoroughly the mistress of Larch Hill that her first reaction was one of anger. How dare he enter the house so casually, without ringing the bell, without sending the maid to ask whether Mrs. Fleming was at home? Who did he think he was? A moment later she remembered that he was Major Richard Fleming of Larch Hill. Everything belonged to him, the land as far as she could see and the house and all its contents, down to the emerald ring on her finger. Herself included. 

The only exception was attempting to close his plump fist around one of the ribbons on his gown. She plucked the ribbon from Julian's grasp, picked him up, and carried him downstairs to meet her husband.

As she descended the grand front staircase she knew that it had been a mistake. Richard was awaiting her at the foot of the stairs, standing at attention. In an immaculate uniform, pressed and polished and blancoed, his Sam Browne belt arranged just so across his chest, he was the very image of what a British officer ought to be on the occasion of his reunion with his new wife. Elaine felt immediately that Julian was an encumbrance, an unneeded prop, a gun waiting to go off in the third act. She ought to have left him in the nursery.

"Richard," she said. "You're home."

"Yes. The trains all ran on time. Remarkable."

"This is Julian."

She had meant to say _this is your son_ but the words stuck in her throat. She was at the foot of the stairs now, curiously reluctant to cross the few tiles that marked off the space between her and her husband. _No man's land._

"Well, yes, the one I've come all the way to see. I suppose I had best give him a proper inspection, hadn't I?"

He spoke with a slightly forced, masculine jocularity; Elaine could not tell whether it was real or feigned. She advanced a pace; she held up her son.

A sudden, horrifying image of him plucking the baby from her grasp and dashing him against the marble floor. A shattering skull, an explosion of blood, shocking red against white and black. She had seen too much in France. She still had nightmares, though she had no right - she, who had never been closer to the front lines than the theatre of a base hospital. 

"Yes, very good," said Richard. "Very good. I imagine he's been - behaving himself, then?"

Julian blinked short-sightedly at the man who must now be his father, a bubble of spit forming at the corner of his mouth. It occurred to Elaine that in his short life, apart from Dr. Lowe, he had never seen a man.

"He's a rather energetic child," she said. "Demanding, I would say."

Even the thick Georgian walls of her new home had not been enough to keep her from hearing Julian's angry wails in the middle of the night. She had not been sleeping well. Since his birth the nightmares had got worse.

"Nothing wrong with a bit of spirit in a boy."

But she had wanted a girl. "No, of course not."

He leaned forward to kiss her cheek; he smelt of cigarettes and troop trains and - despite the crispness of his uniform - the clotted mud of France. Julian, caught between the two of them, began to fuss in her arms, flailing out with tiny fists.

It was still early; none of the rest of the family had yet come down to breakfast. There followed a half hour of which, shell-shocked, Elaine was hardly conscious. She poured out tea for her husband before the sitting room fire and made light conversation - she was thankful for her upbringing, that this at least did not fail her. There was a faint ringing in her ears, as if the aftermath of concussive blast, those moments when one was not yet certain whether one still lived.

Before pouring the tea she had rung for the nurse and sent Julian away. It occurred to Elaine that Richard was not used to babies. He had not known what to say; perhaps he was simply ill at ease in their presence. He was the youngest in his family. Most likely he would not have known a newborn from a baby of three months. She dared not allow herself to hope yet. There was still the christening. 

White-knuckled, she carefully placed the delicate china cup back on the tray. It was Wedgwood, nearly a century old; the Stantons were related to the Wedgwoods through the maternal line. There was no use risking a perfectly matched set if she could not keep her hand from clenching.

"More difficult going back than one would have thought."

It was Richard, speaking after a long silence. Elaine startled slightly before she caught the sense of his words.

"Oh?" she said. "But I'm sure your men were so pleased to have you back among them."

It was one of the things of which he had talked most in the hospital, his guilt at having left behind his men in the trenches. They depended upon him, he said. He would not have his company commanded by an ignorant wartime volunteer. (This had happened anyway, although - one ought not to be glad - the man had been killed just before his return.)

"Those who were left," he said. There was a long pause. "Best thing I ever did, bringing you back. When it got hot, I would tell myself _whatever happens, Elaine is in England, safe at Larch Hill_. Think of you here, you know. Now I needn't imagine. And my boy as well."

"I do hope you'll have some more tea," said Elaine, thinking that perhaps she could handle the pot after all. 

In the base hospital her composure and steady hands had been praised by more than one surgeon. More than one had taken her hands afterwards and offered her compliments a good deal more personal. She, icily proper, had taken her pleasure in rejecting them all. Now, not for the first time and not for the last, she reminded herself of the sin of pride.

All the family seemed to come down to breakfast in a noisy rush. Elaine, feeling a sense of curious separation from the world, allowed herself to be lost amidst the greetings and exclamations that marked Richard's reunion with his people. Once upon a time she would have felt slighted not to be presiding at her own table; now, silent, she was grateful for her own obscurity.

Across the fields, the bells sounding for church sounded her liberation. Richard rang for the cars to be brought round; Elaine rang for the nurse to bring Julian. 

It was another frosty morning, the sun slanting low through the copses to the south-east of the house. Elaine allowed Richard to help her into their car; she had not been out, not further than the garden, since Julian's birth. Wrapped in the fur jacket that had been one of Richard's engagement gifts, she accepted Julian from the nurse and tucked him securely into the fur, cradled against her chest.

The drive to church was short. Richard looked intently at the passing fields - until the village, almost all of it was Fleming land - pointing out here and there a fence that needed mending or the leaves coming out on a field of winter wheat. Richard was rooted in this county by blood and breeding over centuries, for even his Stanton mother had grown up not fifteen miles away, hunting these same fields and coverts. It would be years, decades before she herself could be considered anything other than a newcomer.

And her son? Julian was fussing in her arms. He would not lie quiet against her; he wanted to raise his head, to look around him, gazing fascinated at the bare branches passing by and the fields which would one day be his own. He held out his hand to nothing in particular and he laughed at it. The infant heir of Larch Hill. 

He would never know any differently; Elaine resolved that much, though it was impossible to imagine this small son of hers growing one day into a man.

The churchyard was thronged with Sunday worshippers; the local villagers, whom, said Richard, had grown noticeably more devout in their attendance since the beginning of the war. Of course Elaine had not been to church since Julian's birth. She did not like the eyes upon her now as she carried Julian up the cobbled path, the heels of her shoes slipping on moss and the rotting remains of brown, sodden leaves. One could imagine what they would all be saying: village people had such vicious minds, and seemingly little in the way of entertainment other than painstakingly counting the months after a wedding. Knowing the way in which the village girls seemed to carry on, perhaps it was necessary in their case. Not in hers.

Julian was recovered from his pettishness in the car. He was the very picture of health and beauty, cooing and gurgling winsomely whenever he managed to catch anyone's eye. Perhaps it was her own guilty conscience that left her prickling with chilly sweat underneath her warm and modish fur, but she wished he would not draw such attention to himself.

"And such a _lovely_ baby," Lily Frobisher was reiterating for the third time. "Not a bit like Richard; he was an ugly baby, weren't you, dear?"

Richard was just approaching, having been delayed by the questions and congratulations of his neighbours. On the uneven path, a slight irregularity of his gait was still just perceptible. "Wouldn't know. Hardly would remember, would I?"

"Oh, I'm sure you were darling," said Elaine, a moment too late, gently and - she suspected - unconvincingly. In order to cover her own discomfiture she took the opportunity to hand Julian to his godmother, her own sister Gwen.

"Oh, he's heavy, isn't he?" exclaimed Gwen, laughing as Julian tried to grasp at the feather in her hat. "He's very big."

"Be careful with him," said Elaine sharply. "He isn't a doll."

"No, he's a baby, aren't you?" She addressed herself to Julian, who squealed with pleasure at the attention. "And isn't your Mummy too jealous to share you with anyone else?"

Elaine felt her lips narrowing but said nothing.

During the service she knelt and stood and crossed herself as mechanically as a clock. Richard, at her side, put a hand to an elbow to help her to her feet. Six weeks ago, immediately after Julian's birth, she might have been grateful. Now the gesture seemed superfluous - she remembered helping him to his own feet in the base hospital after his injury, supervising his progress on crutches up and down the hall - and it only added to her sense of time out of joint. The chill of the hard stone floor had crept into her knees through the threadbare kneeler; she resolved to see that new ones were embroidered soon.

To Elaine's left, Gwen held Julian against her shoulder. He was mouthing thoughtfully, with a deceptive mildness, at her hair. He was overtired, and would be hungry soon. For the first time since the beginning of the service, Elaine began to pray sincerely - that they would get through the service and christening before he began to wail.

She need not have bothered: God never answered her prayers. Julian started crying before the christening had even begun. Angry and lost, he was sprinkled with chill water from the baptismal font and so received into the community of the church. Even after being wrapped in a towel he continued to cry, loud and heartily, provoked beyond endurance.

When she took him into her arms finally, he was not his usual pliant self, but stiff with rage, and would not be comforted. She gave him to the baby nurse, who had waited at the back of the church, and sent them back to the house in a separate car. Julian, in disgrace, was not to be a guest at his own baptismal luncheon.

***

"One does always wonder about these war marriages," said Richard's sister Florence, standing by the buffet table with an egg and cress sandwich, paused in judgment, halfway to her mouth. "A fortnight is hardly enough for an engagement, however well your parents might know her people. And then on top of it all to find that they _had_ to get married. My dear, did you see the baby? Not a day early; certainly not seven weeks. It's no surprise that she had no one to stay before now. She refused mother flat out a month ago, when you know that she only wanted to help."

"Only wanted to see Larch Hill again, you mean," said one of the Stanton cousins.

"Well, can you blame her, with Richard away? One hardly knows..."

It was no more spite than one would expect from a woman of forty with three ugly daughters. Elaine, whose upbringing had been a sheltered one even after she was presented at Court, had hardly known the meaning of 'having to get married' before she went to France. The coarseness of the conversations among the nurses had unwilling taught her that, only a few weeks before the undeniable lesson of experience.

She schooled her expression to one of rigid blankness and passed them by. But one knew that it was being said all around, whether one heard it or not. Elaine, circulating through the room, accepted each congratulation and kind wish with irreproachable politeness - her parents would have expected no less - but she could not bring any sort of warmth to her words, unable to free herself from the consciousness that she was stepping through a minefield. Speaking to the Vicar about the Primrose League she could think of nothing else. Barbed wire and unexploded shells, great gashes in the earth into which the unwary might stumble.

She was never to know from what source the thunderclap broke over her head - and not only hers, but that of her infant son, who was destined to suffer for the sins of his father. So assiduous she had been as hostess of the luncheon that she had hardly seen Richard except in passing. So slowly did the fuse burn.

He caught her in the front hallway, as she was returning from seeing the Abbotts to the door. His face was unspeakable, a death mask. She had laid out men whose features had seemed kinder and less implacably set.

"Elaine."

To object then would have been to betray guilt; if she did not object, it was only because her consciousness of guilt ran too deep. From the walls, generations of Flemings looked down at her in horror.

"I would never have thought it of you," he said. "If there's any other explanation..."

She said nothing. There was no explanation other than the truth, which he had already guessed.

"I'll do nothing to embarrass you," he added. "I only ask that you do me the same courtesy."

She bowed her head. "Of course."

"We agreed never to speak of it. Perhaps that was a mistake. But not one that I intend to amend now."

"Thank you, Richard," she said, knowing that one ought to be grateful.

"I'll go back to France as soon as possible. I think it would be best."

Other women's husbands simply beat them. In the moment it seemed far preferable.

***

In an excess of hope she had asked the nurse not to bring Julian to her that night, thinking that Richard might come to her bedroom even after what had passed between them. Her hospital work had taught her more than she ever wanted to learn about men's appetites; he had been away for almost a year and he was, she thought, too honourable a man to solace himself with French whores, as so many sought to excuse themselves for doing. Though she did not relish the idea of resuming her marital duties, Dr. Lowe had told her only the previous week that she might, if her she and her husband wished - and she wished it herself, despite it all, if only because she might still bear him a child. Before he went back to war, now was the time; who knew when his next leave might be? 

Perhaps, if she did that, he might forgive her.

Julian should have been a girl, she thought, her fingers tracing restlessly in the darkness against the silk pillowcase. If he had, he would not have mattered so much. But as he was not, another child could be only small recompense.

Her thoughts ran to diphtheria, and scarlet fever, and influenza. She had cousins who had died as babies; only last year her sister Laura's firstborn had been deathly ill with whooping cough. It was all in the hands of God. No one would say that she had not done all she could...

No. She shivered in horror beneath the warm coverlet.

Better that Julian had not been born, certainly. Better that he had died at birth, perhaps; she had wished it then, but she could not wish it now. Losing him was unimaginable.

She woke as she had gone to bed, alone, and with a strange sense of relief which she rejected as soon as she recognised it. Her cheek was marked by the pillow and her breasts throbbed with milk; she had dreamed strange dreams about a man beside her whom she did not recognise. Over the past weeks, ignoring the fear of overlaying, she had allowed Julian to fall asleep next to her. Now she missed the warmth of his compact body. She sat up and drew her bed jacket around her. Then she rang for the maid, and morning tea, and for her son.

Two days later Richard went back to London, and then to France, and she never saw him again.

***

It was during the battle of the Somme that Julian learned to walk.

She spent hours in the morning poring over the papers - she was shocked at her own laxness - with a pot of China tea close to hand. Richard was at the Somme; this was all she knew from the short, telegraphic missives to which his communications had now been reduced. He had told her that he did not intend to come home on leave. All she could do was accept this. Neither would have dreamt of openly stating the reason but they both knew it well.

Julian was teething. While his mother leaned over the close, clotted paragraphs of the Times, ignoring the war appeals in favour of the map of the front, he sat on her lap chewing intently on the silver teething rattle that had been a gift from Richard's sister. But he was a fickle child and quickly tossed it onto the floor. Elaine ignored him, thinking that it was best not to reward such behaviour; as a result, balked of the attention he had been seeking, he began to teethe avidly on her fingers instead.

This she ignored as well. She was only glad that it was her fingers; she was still nursing him but had recently begun to think that this was carrying good motherhood too far.

She leaned forward and studied the map again. After more than a year at Larch Hill it was difficult to imagine the trenches of France. She was glad for that, thinking now that her parents had been right - it was something that a woman of her class should never have seen.

And Richard was in the midst of it. Leading his men into battle, no doubt; he had longed to be back among them. She wondered whether he would be wounded again. His previous wound still troubled him in certain weathers. He had written that much, mentioning the slight shortening of the leg of which he had been warned in hospital, a weakness in the muscle that made itself known on long walks in the trenches. He worried that it would slow him down during an assault; she thought that it might finally bring him home. Or, then again, it might...

Elaine never finished the thought. Having thoroughly gummed her fingers, Julian had moved on to the knuckles. She felt him beginning to chew on her rings and glanced down just in time to see the empty setting in which her emerald had once had pride of place.

She thrust her fingers quickly into Julian's small mouth, hoping that he had not simply swallowed it. Julian, drooling excessively, made indignant protests but her frantic searches soon found the stone lodged against one chubby cheek.

"You really are a shockingly naughty child," she told him, drawing a handkerchief from her pocket to dry her hands, then wrapping the emerald in it for safekeeping. Her heart was pounding in her chest; the thought of Julian coming to harm had frightened her in a way that all the fighting on the Somme never could.

Thinking that he deserved some punishment, she took him up and set him on the floor halfway across the room. Julian looked up at her with an air of puzzlement creasing his infant brow.

"You shan't sit on Mummy's lap if you can't behave yourself."

He held up his hands to her, but she left him there and returned to her reading of the paper.

A few moments later a stray gurgle caught her attention. Elaine looked up to find Julian - whom previously had confined himself to stationary clinging to her knees - toddling unsteadily but doggedly across the room in her direction. Caught by surprise she smiled and applauded; Julian, in an excess of joy, beamed, threw his chubby hands up, and collapsed in astonishment onto the thick Persian carpet.

It was some time before he came to view walking as a method of locomotion rather than a performance or a means of winning praise. He would toddle towards her (always towards her), eyes glowing with anticipation, awaiting her loving exclamations. Awaiting more applause. 

Nothing she did could make up for that first unwary encouragement. Her blood ran cold at the thought. Day by day he was growing into the image of his absent father - not Richard, but Andy. 

All her love for him, and all her hate, came from that same fount, too closely intermingled to ever be separated.


End file.
